


History Lesson

by Sophonisba



Series: Zophonisbeion [1]
Category: Kyou Kara Maou!, Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alien Mythology/Religion, Gen, Pre-Canon, Prequel, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-08
Updated: 2011-03-08
Packaged: 2017-10-16 19:30:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/168573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sophonisba/pseuds/Sophonisba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And most terrible was the fate of the Other Ancestors, those whose remnants escaped the Silver City, the Star of the Sea, fair Atlante the Downfallen. They asked that whenever they had to make a hard decision, they would know that they were right.</p>
            </blockquote>





	History Lesson

Children, you have been gathered here today because it is time for you to learn the Tale of the Ancestors.

Yes, Ev, I know you've read it already. Not everyone has. And reading isn't the same as listening and understanding; children, this is where you come from, and this is what you must know before you reach where you're going to.

If Ev will shut up, and someone will take Dolph's all-day sucker from him, we can get started. Thank you, Gwyn-Lee.

A long time ago in a swirl of stars far far away, a spirit born of the Twisted Creation was bored, and so it came to our Ancestors and offered them any one thing they might choose, for themselves and their children. And it was a great and mighty spirit, so that what it had promised it could do; but it was of the Twisted Creation, and so everything it ever did had a hidden blade.

Because that's the nature of the Twisted Creation, Gwyn-Lee. It's twisted so tightly that the edges are very sharp. You've had a paper cut, right? And it didn't make the paper any less paper: it just means that you have to be careful with it.

Now, the Ancestors who spoke the language of the West asked that they might be at their best when matters were bleakest, and by and large, so it has been from that day to this. But fine as they were when beset by danger, in times of plenty and prosperity, they grew selfish and smug and greedy, upsetting matters many lands over in order to feed their greed and vanity.

The Ancestors who spoke the language of the East asked that they might be magnificent in all their deeds, and so they were. When they were heroic, they were magnificent in their heroism; when they were orderly, they were magnificent in their order; when they were cruel, it was magnificent cruelty on the grand scale.

Wisest perhaps were those who spoke the tongue of the Middle, the Ancestors of the people we call Puddings, who asked that they learn common sense. But still, most of them learned common sense at great pain whether they would or no, either from being crowded between the lands of the East and West or from the days after the Days of Fire came from the South.

And most terrible was the fate of the Other Ancestors, those whose remnants escaped the Silver City, the Star of the Sea, fair Atlante the Downfallen. They asked that whenever they had to make a hard decision, they would know that they were right.

Not whether they were right, Ev. That they were right. This is why the story must be told: for whether they were right or wrong, they knew that they were right, and therefore could never be convinced that they were wrong. And in this utter and fallible certainty, they damned themselves many times over, and committed abomination.

Fallible means "possible to be wrong," Dolph. Thank you for asking. You can tell I'm fallible, using a word many of you wouldn't know.

First the Other Ancestors called on the Elements to create many human people. They said "These are beautiful people, and we like having them around"; they played with them for a while, and then went home and left them out.

If you go home and leave your toys out, as long as they are not the kind that are ruined when they get wet, the worst thing that is likely to happen is that somebody will trip over an unexpected toy; but if you leave living creatures out, much worse things will happen. The humans grew up all anyhow, and that is why the ones around us live the way they do.

No, Ev, they don't live in a horrible mess because they like it that way; they live that way because nobody ever told them any better when they were little, and they're much too sensitive about the idea of being treated like a child now that they're big.

Then the Other Ancestors called on the Elements to try to create more human people, but something went wrong and instead they created vampires. They said "Ew, these people look gross; whose fault is it?" and after they argued for a very long time, because nobody would believe that he or she had made a mistake, they went home and left the vampires where they'd found them, and pretended they weren't there.

Yes, Isianne, that is in fact a spectacularly stupid thing to do about vampires.

And then, because they wanted to punish people, they called on the Elements to create spirits out of rage and pain and bound them into shapes like men, and those were the Furies, who could hunt and hunt and hunt until they had killed the whole world full of Ancestors and everybody else and still not be satisfied.

No, no questions just now. This is the worst part.

The Furies were born in pain and died, if die they did, in pain, and even dead were returned to no more than spirits of rage; and so they went to the Other Ancestors who had created them and said "We hurt. You are our parents; make it better!"

And the Other Ancestors -- the Other Ancestors dared to say "You are no children of ours; we made you to do our bidding. Now do as we bid you, lest we hurt you as even you have never been hurt before!"

And at these words, the Elements withdrew themselves from the worlds of mortals. The Ancestors sought to use them to punish the Furies, and nothing happened; the Furies ran away, and the Ancestors decided to kill them all, rather than have even one roam the world out from under their control. Now it may be that they perished, or it may be that they survived; but sure it is that the Ancestors went home, and decided that the Elements must have gone away by some natural process -- perhaps it was just something that happened as the world got older -- and pretended that the Furies had never existed, hiding the knowledge even from themselves until a horde of angry vampires descended upon a Silver City that could no longer raise the winds to blow them away, or command the earth to gape open beneath them, or call the waters to rise up and drown them, or summon the flames to burn them stone and bone.

Nor could anyone save Mieselis, then locked in her frozen sleep from age to age, and the children she in time bore -- no Other Ancestor or Local Ancestor or no ancestor at all -- call upon the Elements, for the Elements had withdrawn themselves from all save the shining bloodline of Mieselis until the day that the wrongs done the Furies be made right, and the Furies had suffered such grievous abomination that there was no justice for it this side of the grave.

For while children may or may not be a welcome or convenient gift, to make them and then fail them is sure damnation: to make them for the sake of failing them, to make them for the sake of weaponry or torture or the chance to slay them is abomination so great that the Earth shudders under it, and that Water with joy and sorrow commingled in immense satisfaction most readily rises up to drown it deep until by hidden, slow currents it may at last be cleansed and one more made pure and whole.

And so, after the Other Ancestors had fled here and even after they had become one people with us, the shame and the horror of what had been done to the Furies was such that only the very wisest of us was permitted to know, until at last the day came when we had a king of our own.

The Initial King was of the shining blood of the sons of Mieselis, who had pledged herself utterly to the Elements ere ever the idea of making servants had crossed her kindred's minds, and who had drifted between stars in frozen sleep during all the creation and use and condemnation of the Furies, and thus who became the only bloodline who could still call upon their might.

And because he was the king, and the king is the land, and the land is the people, all the glories and shames of his people were his to take or make good; and so he consulted with his sages and his namers, and made the first of the Seven Pacts with the elements: that just as a name is the thing and part of the thing, and the Name is the thing and the whole of the thing, the Elements would write the Name of the Furies upon the world, and the Initial King would then make it better for them.

And so the Elements wrote the Name upon the world. It was a very long name --

Yes, it was much longer than "Keigwyneth-Lir Apraxia-Celestine Wilda von Bielefeld." It was so long that if you started writing it at the upper left corner of the wall behind me, you would fill the whole wall and not be done with the name.

No, I don't know what it was. It's not something that ought to be spoken, in any case.

\-- and when it was done, the namers consulted and then guided the Initial King as he rewrote the Name, writing the capacity for peace and for indifference and for choice into the very nature of the Furies.

No, Ev, that didn't make it right. Just because you fix something that went wrong doesn't mean that you've fixed all the damage that the wrong thing did.

But because the damage was done because of the way that the Other Ancestors behaved to their children, the Initial King decided that the only good way to repay it would be the way that their descendants behaved to their children.

The making of children is a high and very holy act. It should only be done when the children are wanted. It should only be done when people are prepared to care for the child, whether it be given into the care of others to tend or you tend it yourself.

But even so, it will all work out somehow as long as you keep to the terms of the last of the Seven Pacts. Someday you, too, will face the Elements and pledge yourself to the one that offers under the contract, and this is the contract that you will use:

You will never make a child without securing its care for all the days of your life, and arranging for its care for all the days of its life after. You will never do violence against a child save in defense of your own life or others' or for that least loving discipline demands, and even then you will be mindful of the many ways in which children are fragile. Though weapons of man pierce you or vampires drain you to a husk or the Furies rend you asunder in pieces too small to see, you will never make a child to be a weapon, nor yet a shield. You will see that all these matters are told to your children, as I have told them to you. While you hold to these, the Element that chooses you will serve you and respond to your shaping; but if ever you break this contract, your Element has leave to destroy you until not even bones are left.

Remember this, for the sake of your children. Remember this, for the sake of your Elements. Remember this, for the sake of your future, you who bear the blood of the Other Ancestors and may well need another to tell you when you are wrong.

That's all. You can run along and play now.

**Author's Note:**

> In my head, Ev is Wolfram's father, for what it's worth. As well as a genetic donor _before_ his marriage to Caecilie.
> 
> One line of monologue is straight out of A. A. Milne.


End file.
